Abstract
National Medical Council has included teaching rational prescribing practices into its 2nd phase medical curriculum to inculcate the habit of writing rational and legible prescription by the health-care professionals to reduce prescription errors. The study aims to assess the improvement in prescribing skill of 2nd phase MBBS students by comparing against the WHO guidelines for prescription writing after teaching them the concepts of rational prescription writing, p-drug and how to effectively communicate with patients on proper use of prescribed medications. Also assess the confidence of the students in basic prescribing skill and better retention of pharmacology concepts by a feedback questionnaire before and after the teaching session. 238 students of 2nd phase MBBS were asked to write a prescription for a common clinical condition and answer a self-administered questionnaire. An educational intervention session was conducted in small groups of 25 students. They were allowed 1 day for self-study and again the same process was repeated. Their prescriptions (both pre-session and post-session) were analysed based on WHO guidelines of safe prescribing and the feed-back questionnaire were analysed using appropriate statistics. In the 4-point scoring system there is an improvement in the post-session scores for prescriber details (53% having score1), patient details (50% having score3) and as for drug details 36% students scored 1 and 39% scored 3 as they forgot to address the problem of drug-drug interaction. Teaching concept of prescription writing to undergraduate students in small groups greatly influences the quality of prescriptions of the students and helps build more confident prescribers and less prescription errors.
Keywords: Educational Intervention, Prescription Error, Prescription Writing, 2nd Phase MBBS Students.